Polanski

I’ve always been a class-first socialist. The fundamental divide in society isn’t between environmentalists and anti-environmentalists - it’s between those who own capital and those who sell their labour. Everything else, including the climate crisis, is filtered through that basic reality. So when Zack Polanski won the Green Party leadership with his eco-populist platform, my immediate response was: “finally, someone who gets it”.

Polanski’s landslide victory - 85% of the vote, the largest margin in Green Party history - represented something I’d been waiting for: a political movement that refused to separate environmental action from economic justice. His message was crystal clear: you can’t ask people to worry about net zero when they’re struggling to heat their homes. Climate action without wealth redistribution is middle-class theatre.

This is correct politics. The climate crisis and inequality aren’t separate problems requiring separate solutions - they’re interconnected manifestations of the same system that prioritises profit over people and planet. Polanski’s approach of linking climate action with wealth taxes, renationalisation, and Universal Basic Income represents a mature understanding of how change actually happens.

I joined the Green Party on election day 2024, disgusted with Labour’s rightward drift under Starmer. I even tried setting up a Rhondda group, though it never got off the ground. When the leadership campaign began, I found myself supporting Polanski’s vision despite my reservations about joining what felt like an entryist movement.

But here’s my problem: I left the party before the leadership vote was held.

It wasn’t because I disagreed with Polanski’s class analysis - I agreed with almost everything he said. It was because I couldn’t shake the fear that in pivoting toward “Old Labour with solar panels,” the Green Party was abandoning the very environmental expertise that made it valuable in the first place.

The Greens have been the only major party consistently pushing environmental issues up the political agenda. They’ve done the unglamorous work of developing policy frameworks, building expertise, and maintaining pressure when everyone else was focused elsewhere. That institutional knowledge and environmental focus has been invaluable, even when their broader politics were frustratingly centrist.

My fear is this: if the Green Party becomes primarily a left-populist vehicle that happens to mention climate change, who fills the environmental advocacy vacuum? Labour certainly won’t - they’ve proven repeatedly that environmental concerns disappear the moment they conflict with other priorities. The Lib Dems talk a good game but fold at the first sign of economic pressure.

This isn’t about preferring middle-class environmentalism over working-class politics. It’s about recognising that we need dedicated environmental advocacy alongside class-based politics, not instead of it. The climate crisis requires both economic justice and specific environmental expertise. You need people who understand carbon budgets, biodiversity loss, and renewable energy transitions, not just people who understand that inequality is bad.

Polanski’s 85% victory margin shows the membership decisively rejected these concerns. Maybe they’re right. Maybe eco-populism will prove more effective at delivering both environmental and social justice than the previous approach. The party membership has grown to record levels, suggesting this message resonates.

But I can’t help feeling we’re conducting an experiment with stakes too high to get wrong. If this approach works, we get the politics we desperately need. If it fails, we may have lost the only party that made environmental issues a consistent priority.

The left has been losing for over a decade. We need new approaches, new coalitions, new ways of talking about change. Polanski’s class-first environmentalism might be exactly what we need. I just hope someone, somewhere, is still doing the boring work of environmental policy development while we figure out whether this gamble pays off.